Bad Memory

Some really sobering stuff in a paper I just got from Statscan called, “Job Market Realities for Post-Secondary Graduates”. Listen to this:

“Graduates of a field with low unemployment and little underemployment were also likely to earn high salaries and be content with their jobs. They were usually graduates of job-oriented fields such as engineering, teacher training, most health disciplines, business, computer science and some technologies.”

“A more general education in subjects with little practical application often (leads) to a lower-paid job which made little use of knowledge and skills acquired during the years of study… those who fared worst held degrees/diplomas in fine and applied arts, humanities and social sciences and some of the sciences.”

“Many trades, which do not require post-secondary education, pay better than some occupations held by postsecondary graduates, especially office work.”

“Newfoundland offered the highest starting salaries, with Saskatchewan a close second.”

“Half of all bachelor’s graduates planned to go back to school within two years.”

Enraging what decades of neo-liberalism has done to our education system, huh? Why can’t we go back to the 70s when everyone had a job, humanities and social science graduates weren’t undervalued and everyone had a job?

Oh, wait, hang on. This survey is from the 1970s! In fact, all of this is from the two-year follow-up of the university and college graduating classes of 1976 (the forerunner of the current National Graduates Survey).

Turns out the 1970s weren’t quit the bonanza that some folks like Generation Squeeze like to make it out. For the class of 1976 in Ontario, the unemployment rate 2 years out for university graduates was 8%. For the class of 2010, it was 5%. Average salary 2 years out for the class of 1976 was $14,600, or $47,300 in 2012 dollars. For the class of 2012, the equivalent figure was $49,277. In 1978, 80% of recent grads said their job had a relationship with their field of study. In 2012? 82%.

I could go on here, but you get the picture. There’s very little going on for graduates in the labour market that wasn’t going on forty years ago. Back then, we were also in a resource boom, and trades looked good compared to Arts and Science. Jobs in Newfoundland and Saskatchewan looked pretty good compared to jobs in Ontario (we don’t know about Quebec because back during the first PQ government, Quebec institutions weren’t allowed to participate in national studies like this). This is just a phase we go through.

Of course, some people may look at this result and see stagnation. Graduates only getting a $2,000 raise in 40 years! But this is to miss the point almost entirely. In 1978, the participation rate at Canadian universities was around 10%; we’re now just over 30%. That is to say, even accounting for population growth, there are three times as many young people getting salaries which, on average, are the same as the coddled, easy-going graduates of the mid-70s.

Nostalgia makes us look at the past with rose-coloured glasses. But it’s no basis for making policy. Look past the soft-focus gauze and the rantings of the hell-in-a handbasket crowd: the fact is, our grads are doing as well as they have at any time in the last 40 years. We should celebrate that.